Went the Johnny Cash route with a male trooper named Sue.

It is difficult to have a "bad" build as long as you spend 31 points in a specific tree. The only choices really left to the player are to spend talent points on PvP specific cooldowns or on minor increases in damage. The 10 points spent outside of your main tree should be focused on increasing base damage/healing. Just use common sense. Overall, anyone with a basic level of MMO experience should be able to construct a viable build. BW has made it so that bad builds are really hard to make unless you try for hybrid builds.

If you get the fully buffed DR (5 vortexes) to crit after 1-3 crits on FA you will be pulling aggro in no time. I do it all of the time to the tank I duo with. I think he finally gave up and doesn't waste time on using taunts. The deadly trinity of DR, HIB, and FA will bring a big smile to your face.

The only part that annoys me is the loud sound effects when he is running around. Other than that, he is HK-47 with a sunnier disposition.

The droid tank seems to be the best choice for leveling up. By pulling aggro it allows you to get off an uninterrupted full auto. With Elara you lose DPS due to pushback. To heal the droid just mount and unmount which returns 100% of health. The only downside is that the droid tends to pull extra mobs at times, especially when you are in an area with a lot of densely packed mobs. I don't know how well Assault Specialist levels, but Gunnery is very effective. You will want to use AoE at every opportunity. Try to find ways of using pulse cannon, sticky grenade, plasma grenade, and hail of bolts whenever possible. Always use mortar volley when it is off CD. Other than that, use the standard full auto, gravround, HIB, Demo round rotation.

For taking out a tightly packed group of mobs? Yes. While plasma grenade is in the air cast hail of bolts. It almost does more damage than mortar volley. However, it does use up half of your ammo so only use it on weak mobs where you aren't worried about ammo usage.

If you are going Gunnery . . . That small difference is made up by the armor penetration debuff that GR puts on the mob. Once you have GR just remove CB from your rotation, keybinds, and hotbars. It is dead to you.

It's a mixed bag. Up to level 30 or so you can solo heal 4 man heroics as long as you run with a competent group. They HAVE TO keep the mobs off of you because you have no anti-pushback talents. This is probably the major problem I have had while healing with a DPS spec. After Tatooine it gets progressively more difficult to heal with a DPS spec in heroics. However, you will not be able to main heal the boss encounters in flashpoints starting with Mandalorian Raiders around level 25. There is just too much healing needed over a long time period. If you have a lot of skill and a good group you may be able to pull it off, but no one wants a main healer with those requirements if they can get a heal specced trooper instead. IMHO, dual specs would be a very, very nice addition to this game. It would make grouping a lot easier. Hopefully we will be able to switch between heal and DPS specs on the fly in the near future.

As others have stated, Grav Round is the mirror talent. I played both the BH and trooper over lvl 30 in beta and I like the animations for trooper a LOT more than the BH. A little backstory might help here. I planned on rolling a Commando for my main, but I didn't want to ruin the story in beta. I decided that rolling BH would be a good way to check out the class without ruining the class for launch. I hated BH, and it was for the reasons that you listed. The animations ruined it for me. I hunched over to launch missiles and used squirt guns. This really worried me because if I didn't like playing the BH, perhaps I would not like playing the Commando. This convinced me to try out the trooper. It was night and day. I had a blast playing the trooper. The animations really worked for me. The knockback for troopers is way awesome while it is somewhat lackluster for BH's. The pulse cannon (AoE cone damage) is much better for troopers than the flames for BH's. Of course, your mileage may vary. This is just my very subjective opinion. I wouldn't doubt for a moment that there are people out there who have just the opposite opinion, and they would be as right as I am. I think this really comes down to taste.

C'mon dude. It's fine if you have a different opinion on the game. I disagree on many points, but that's fine. TOR isn't for everyone. However, all reviews are SUBJECTIVE. Just realize that. As the saying goes, you are entitled to your own opinions but not your own facts.

C'mon dude. It's fine if you have a different opinion on the game. I disagree on many points, but that's fine. TOR isn't for everyone. However, all reviews are SUBJECTIVE. Just realize that. As the saying goes, you are entitled to your own opinions but not your own facts.

I would assume that they same sharding technology currently in the game would be used in a single server system. Therefore, only ~200 per instance on each planet. Perhaps it is. Not sure what the current server technology is like. I would assume that a large enough server farm could handle it, but maybe I am wrong. It seems like a solvable tech problem. It is an interesting question. I will copmletely agree that current technology and standardized code works much better with separate servers. However, given enough time and money it seems doable.

I agree. It can be done. It is only a technical problem. If done correctly you will not have excessive lag. The downside is that you lose a server community. I, for one, like a smaller community where you see the same guild, and where guilds can build up a reputation on your server. There is no way that this can happen on a single server setup. At best, they can make sure that your guild is always on the same shard, but even that may not happen all of the time. To use an analogy, you lose the small town feel.

Keep chat limited to instances (e.g. Coruscant 42) and it wouldn't be that bad.

I think EVE players would disagree.

It's a bigger headache, most of all. Eve does this and they have to run the game on a supercomputer, and I would assume they have specialized code. Most MMO code has been optimized for the current server setup.

7/21, 7 am. I'm in.